We Stopped Taking Tickets, we Started Owning Products.

At Opply, we’ve always had great engineers. Talented, fast, committed. But when I joined, something was missing. Not skill, not dedication, but ownership.

We were brilliant executors. Hand us a ticket, and we would deliver. Hand us a bug, and we would fix it. Features got built, tickets got closed. From the outside, it looked like progress. But here’s the truth: we weren’t in control of the game we were playing.

The way we worked felt like a production line. Product wrote the specs, engineering built the features, QA tested them. Each team did their part, then passed the baton to the next.

And with every handoff, a little accountability slipped away. Issues that could have been caught in discovery or design only surfaced when QA tested them at the very end. For engineers, the scoreboard was simple: no bugs = good job. Whether the work actually moved a business metric? That was someone else’s problem.

Yes, the machine kept running. But it ran slowly, reactively, and without a clear sense of purpose. We weren’t building products: we were building parts.

The Shift: From Executors to Product Engineers

The breakthrough wasn’t a new tool or process. It was a change in identity. We stopped thinking of ourselves as “software engineers” in the narrow sense, as people who just build what is asked. Instead, we became "product engineers": owners of problems, architects of solutions, accountable for the outcome.

This mindset shift was huge. It meant that when a business challenge landed on our desks, our first question wasn’t “What’s the spec?” but “What’s the real goal here", and "what’s the smartest way to achieve it?”

We started getting involved early in product discovery. We asked questions. We challenged assumptions. We brought new ideas to the table. By the time something reached development, we didn’t just understand the “what”, we understood the “why.”

What Product Engineers Own

We still collaborate with product management to decide which problems to tackle first. But when it comes to solving those problems, the ownership is fully with the engineers:

We decide which solution to pursue, define what success looks like, design and build the technical implementation, test it at every level, from unit to end-to-end, and track our own KPIs to measure impact. It’s no longer about “Did we ship?” It’s about “Did it work?”

Telling the Story

When a milestone ships, it’s no longer product managers walking stakeholders through a demo. It’s the engineers.

We don’t just click through a feature. We explain why it matters, how we approached it, the trade-offs we made, and the results we expect. It’s our work, and we own the narrative as much as the code.

The Results

The change has been dramatic: we are faster, because we build MVPs, get them into users’ hands, and iterate without waiting for the perfect plan.
We are building with higher quality, because understanding the “why” leads to smarter technical decisions. And our work now connects directly to the company’s goals, every metric we track ties to a business outcome.

But maybe the most important shift is in the way engineers feel. They’re not ticket-takers anymore. They’re problem-solvers, innovators, and genuine stakeholders in Opply’s success.

What We Learned

Ownership isn’t something you declare in a meeting, it’s rather something you practice, every day. You have to give people the trust, context, and space to take it on. And when you do, the difference is night and day.

We’ve moved from building features to building products. From taking tickets to taking responsibility. From software engineers… to product engineers.